Vista da cidade de Amsterdã

In October 1885 the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam was barely three months old, and Van Gogh made the trip up from the village of Nuenen mainly to stand in front of the Dutch masters he loved, Rembrandt and Frans Hals above all. On the 7th he was at the station, waiting for a friend, the amateur painter Anton Kerssemakers. To fill the time he set up by a window in the waiting room and painted the view outside, the canal, the bridges, a slice of grey city sky. He wrote to his brother Theo that the whole thing had taken him about an hour, dashed off while he waited for the train to come in.